Republican strategist and former Bush Administration official Karl Rove called the 2026 midterm elections a referendum on President Donald Trump, but said that "Texas had special circumstances" with controversial Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton's nomination to the U.S. Senate.
In an interview withHouston Public Media, Rove called Paxton "a criminal, a crook, a guy who had violated the law," and said his presence on the ticket brought Republicans down statewide.
"Republicans cannot simply say we’re going to nominate a crook to head our ticket, and we’re going to loyally support the President of the United States — even when we think it’s wrong and not in our state’s interest — and still continue to have the support of Texans," Rove said.
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Though he has not met Senator-elect James Talarico or Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, Rove called them both "smart" for running more centrist campaigns. He also said the Texas Republican Party may have been in a different position if incumbent Senator John Cornyn had received the nomination for the Senate seat over Paxton.
"I think it would have been different because, look, Cornyn would not have had the record — Talarico would not be able to say spend five months saying ‘you’re corrupt,'" Rove said, "and Cornyn would have been able to say, ‘With all due respect, James, you and I have a different view when it comes to' blank."
Rove, a former advisor and deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush, said the war in Iran was not as singularly to blame for Republicans' performance as Trump Administration members have pinned it to be.
He also pushed back against comparisons between the Iran War and the Iraq War, of which he is considered one of the principal architects. The 2006 midterm elections, when Democrats last swept both chambers of Congress and other races across the country, has been considered a referendum on the Iraq War.
"George W. Bush spent a lot of time explaining what was going on and why," Rove said. "There’s something about the things abroad where Americans say, ‘I don’t like that, but maybe the president — he’s been explaining it to me — maybe he knows more than I do, so I got to trust him.' We never heard that from Donald Trump. Second of all, we lost 30 seats, not 44. And third, more importantly, we didn’t lose 30 seats all because of the war."
Rove, who was at the University of Houston on Thursday for a lecture evaluating the midterm results hosted by the UH Hobby School of Public Affairs, argued Republicans need to move forward with their own policy agendas rather than simply opposing Democrat policies for the next two years.
"This was a revulsion against Donald Trump, it was not a ‘oh my God, the Democrats have got the best ideas possible,'" he said. "And now they’re [Democrats] going to have difficulties in fashioning what their agenda is. Is the agenda going to be dominated in the public mind by oversight, or is it going to be dominated by ideas that they say will make my life better?"
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