By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Paxton heads toward the winner’s circle.
In today’s GOP landscape, there are many variations on a uniform theme of ideological drift toward the far horizons of extremism. Your regular old conservatives and then people who are very conservative and some who are hard-core conservative. Since loyalty to Donald Trump has become the true litmus test for conservatism, however, you have to note whether a given Republican is “MAGA” or “ultra-MAGA.” All this hairsplitting on what used to be the right end of the spectrum is especially notable in the nation’s second-largest state, where everything, including extremism, is just a little bit bigger. This is evident in the May 26 Texas GOP runoff elections, where the marquee contests match different shades of blood red.
