Senate Majority PAC announced Thursday that it was booking $8.6 million in Texas to help Democrat MJ Hegar unseat Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a big move that makes it the first major outside group to reserve TV time in the priciest state on the 2020 Senate map.
Indeed, this is the first time in a very long time that a prominent organization on either side of the aisle has spent a serious amount of money on a Senate race in the Lone Star State, which last voted to send a Democrat to the upper chamber in 1988. Even in 2018, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Ted Cruz, national Democrats and Republicans each largely avoided this expensive state in order to direct their resources to other Senate battles.
However, SMP may have a good reason to take a chance on Texas this year. As of Thursday, the Daily Kos Elections polling average gives Cornyn just a 46-42 edge over Hegar, and a number of surveys also show that Joe Biden has a real chance to become the first Democrat to win the state’s electoral votes since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Hegar also outraised Cornyn $14 million to $7.2 million during the third quarter of 2020, and she ended September with a small $8.5 million to $8 million cash-on-hand edge.
SMP’s first TV spots, which are running in English and Spanish, each go after Cornyn on health care. “John Cornyn led the charge to eliminate the law that protects people with pre-existing conditions,” the narrator says, adding, “John Cornyn is a fraud who sold us out.”
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