The primary-defector pool that doesn't follow through

I recommend Alexander Muse's substack. This is a thoughtful article about the very slight impact on a general election of a bitterly contested primary fight, which is instructive in the case of Cornyn vs. Paxton. Frankly, not even Cornyn himself is urging the absurd choice of a Talarico (give me a break) vote in protest against the impervious horrors of a Paxton victory.

Lonna Rae Atkeson’s seminal paper “Moving Toward Unity” in American Politics Quarterly found that supporters of losing primary candidates revert to the eventual nominee at predictable rates as the general election approaches. Jeffrey Lazarus, writing in Legislative Studies Quarterly, established that the apparent correlation between divisive primaries and weaker general-election performance is not causal at all, but a joint product of candidate quality and pre-primary expectations. Fouirnaies and Hall at Stanford in confirmed that in base-state seats with partisan leans above 7 points, the measurable divisive-primary penalty is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Texas leans R+10 to R+13. It is the cleanest possible case for the proposition that the primary will leave no footprint on the general election.

But the historical record is where this argument lives or dies. The frame is simple. The runner-up’s coalition comes home. It has always come home. The mechanism is what political scientists call partisan reversion, and it has been visible in every contested base-state primary of the modern era.