MJ Hegar Is Taking On John Cornyn For Senate This Time, Not John Carter In TX-31

As the lady says, Texans don't give up easy. Yesterday MJ Hegar, the former Air Force helicopter pilot who ran a strong race against John Carter in 2018, is taking on bigger game in 2020-- Texas senior Senator John Cornyn. The was the seat everyone wanted Beto to run for before launching is ill-advised presidential run. First a note: it's still possible that other strong Democratic candidate will get into the race-- San Antonio congressman Joaquín Castro has been hinting he'll run and former state Rep. Mark Strama could run. But, no matter what happens, MJ will be a contender. On paper, the state of Texas is an easier target for someone like her than TX-31 was. The PVI of TX-31 is a pretty prohibitive R+10. The state's PVI-- slightly less prohibitive, is R+8. Trump beat Hillary statewide 52.23% to 43.24%. He beat her in the 31st 53.5% to 40.8%.

Last year Hegar did a lot better than Clinton did in the district. The final score was 144,680 (50.6%) for Carter and 136,362 (47.7%) for Hegar. In fact, she won the bigger of the two counties in the district, Williamson, but not by enough (D+2) to overcome the powerful red-lean of Bell County (R+15).

So what about the 31st? It's certainly a DCCC target but with Hegar running for Senate, is there an obvious candidate? In fact, Carter is 78 and doddering and may decide too not even run again. One thing we can be certain of-- if the new DCCC regional vice chair, Marc Veasey is charged with recruiting a candidate, Carter will be able to go to sleep now and wake up reelected in 2020. One Williamson County progressive, Mike Clark, still not officially in the race, told me just moments ago that he plans to run for the Democratic nomination and that he expects several others to do likewise. We'll be hearing more from him soon but I can tell you that he supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, supports Pramila Jayapal's new and improved Medicare-For-All Act and backs the Green New Deal framework resolution as way to get busy tackling the climate change crisis.

By the way, in 2018 Hegar spent $4,998,676 to Carter's $1,943,447. There wasn't any big outside spending, although Pelosi's PAC put in $138,738 and the DCCC spent $15,000. It won't be easy for anyone to outraise what Hegar accomplished, but this time the DCCC is paying attention and, at least in theory, someone probably woke up EMILY's List.