The Cornyn / Perry / McCain Analog

Cornyn's fundraising totals in the second quarter are in, and he's going to have plenty of money — the report shows $2.2 million raised and $5.34 million in the bank. But will he have the voter support he needs to keep his seat? Via Harvey comes the fundraising news in the form of the ever-official campaign statement, after the jump.

The John Cornyn re-election campaign raised $2.2 million in contributions during the second quarter, highest total of any U.S. Senate candidate in the country for the reporting period. The total brought Cornyn’s cash on hand to $5.34 million, just behind Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s $5.4 million among GOP Senators in the 2008 cycle.

So, Cornyn's not slacking on fundraising, and managed to get some dollars squared away. He also managed to put up strong numbers in answer to Watts' impressive fundraising totals last quarter, which was an important step for him.

John Cornyn's approval ratings are low. This is true. We've all been talking about it for months now, and it hasn't changed much, even with his stalwart opposition to any kind of immigration reform. He's got an election coming up in 2008 and he's going to face a formidable challenge from the Democratic Party. It is certainly fun for all of us to point to reasons why Cornyn is vulnerable and why Cornyn will lose, but I think a closer examination of how Cornyn's party will affect him in Texas is proper. After all, he will have plenty of money to run his race, and no one is going to sneak up on him, or surprise him. Aside from the general knowledge that being a Republican probably helps you in a generic sense in Texas, what does the context of the state and national GOP do for Cornyn?

Governor Perry has been all over the map since the 2006 election, during which his political playbook was predictable and the election returns were surprisingly bad for him. As the incumbent Texas governor running as the only identified Republican, Perry was barely able to garner 39% of the vote. It was enough to win, but it was also low enough to be embarrassing.

Perry did everything right during the election. He attacked Chris Bell, his main rival, as a rank-and-file Democrat who would immediately get up to no good and raise taxes, and also reminded everyone that he was a liberal and/or Democrat. This is usually a killer strategy in Texas for a Republican to deploy against Democrats. This and any other talking points the GOP can muster up from the Barrel of Overgeneralization and Fear-Mongering end up being the debate on "the issues."

The Sunday before the election, Perry went to church and agreed with the preacher there that, essentially, anyone who isn't a Christian is "going straight to Hell." He threw more red meat to the base and his own supporters by encouraging tax cuts and aiming to fast track the construction of lots of coal-burning plants by TXU, clearly and unabashedly favoring business over the environment. This all sounds about par for the course for a prominent Republican elected official in Texas.

Notice, however, that all that base-pandering still only managed to garner him 39% of the vote in an election where he squared off against a good (if underfunded) Democratic candidate in Bell, a laughably insufficient Republican-turned-independent-to-avoid-a-primary candidate in Carole Strayhorn, and a gimmick candidate in Kinky Friedman. The lesson was clear, in that Texas Republicans are still conservatives but aren't immune from staying home or voting for alternatives to someone with an R next to their name.

Cornyn has yet to offend the conservative base like Perry did with his HPV vaccine executive order, but his base is ostensibly the same as Perry's, and I would wager Perry's name ID is stronger than Cornyn's. Granted, Cornyn is not likely to have a field of opponents like Perry did — no freshly independent ex-Republican to siphon away votes — but the shift against the Republican Party has continued on since the election. More and more we hear that Latinos are abandoning the Republican Party, which offered a hard line on social issues but not much else to go with a severe, hostile take on immigration.

So where does McCain fit in to the analogy? He is an example of what can happen when you get on the wrong side of the most important and divisive issue of the day. Cornyn's unabashed support for the Iraq War is not likely to do much more than solidify the bloc he was already going to get in Texas by being a socially conservative Republican; McCain's support for the war has eroded his primary lead nationally and left him without any sort of high ground to stand on. McCain's implosion and the seemingly inevitable absence of any truly exciting, motivating candidate as the GOP nominee in the general election will likewise not help Cornyn much at all.

Cornyn will be able to say he steadfastly fought against immigration, and that's it. Unless something specific and enormous changes between now and then, reminding everyone of how he supported the President and his Iraq policies will damage him. His immigration stance will shore up that same base, again, but will lose him the same Latino voters that are turning away from the GOP in droves.

Cornyn has no stances on any issues (thus far) that would make him appealing to Independents who don't already lean social conservative and just dislike being associated with a party. I can't think of many Democrats that would vote for him. Even a Democrat who doesn't support immigration reform would likely be turned off by his position on Iraq or his support for Bush.

Cornyn has painted himself into an ideological corner from which there is little opportunity to escape. You know for certain he can get Perry's 39% and he is likely to be able to get 46-48% without breaking a sweat — this is, after all, Texas, and Cornyn is bound to run a competent, well-financed campaign.

The real election question will come down to those Republicans and Independents who are turned off by Bush and the war. If he can manage to divorce himself from those two things between now and November, he will help himself out a great deal, but I don't know how he does that with any degree of success. It is who he is, and it is what will be presented to the voters. Good fundraising totals will only allow him to communicate a message that wasn't going to do much for him in the first place.