NY Times: “A majority of Texas voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in an election that a few polls showed Joe Biden winning in Texas by as much as five points. John Cornyn, the Republican incumbent senator whom Democrats spent more than $29 million trying to defeat, won re-election by more than nine points. Republicans held each of the 10 House of Representatives seats in the state that some election forecasters had deemed “in play.” With control of redistricting at stake, they maintained their state House majority, making major inroads in heavily Hispanic counties along the border — historically Democratic territory — to a degree that shocked even Republicans….
As an unassailable citadel of Republican electoral power for a generation, and one whose demography and geography reflect the United States in miniature, Texas is often a leading indicator of political trends in the party. So it is a grim omen for Republican leaders that in this state, where the G.O.P. achieved what might be described as the best-case scenario for the party’s hopes in other states in the 2022 midterm elections, the state’s prominent Republicans are struggling against one another as if they had just gone down in a rout. Abbott, ostensibly the most powerful Republican in Texas, has seen his approval rating steadily plummet, reaching a four-year low of 45 percent in March, according to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Though he remains broadly popular with Republican voters, in October his own state party’s leadership took the extraordinary step of protesting against him outside the governor’s mansion — “a striking display of intraparty defiance,” The Texas Tribune called it. Ever since, he has operated as if the protesters remain camped outside his door.”