RealClearPolitics has collected yesterday’s primary results here. I focused on the race featuring Ed Gallrein against incumbent Republican Rep. Thomas Massie in the Kentucky Fourth Congressional District primary. Massie lost by ten points, 55 percent to 45 percent, or about 10,000 votes.
Massie has turned massively erratic in a Tucker Carlson sort of way. He gave a hint of his post-congressional career in his graceless remarks conceding defeat by…well, you know who. No need to spell it out exactly. I wish we could say good riddance, and we can, but he will move on to peddle the same wares in a different “space.”
Just an incredibly classless person. pic.twitter.com/Ggttbe3ffc
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) May 20, 2026
New York Rep. Mike Lawler is a Catholic whose close encounter with the son of Rand Paul gave him the experience of being called out as a Jew. He also has a sense of humor and an appreciation of concision that exceeds the congressional norm by a wide margin. He commented on X: “My people have spoken. Shalom @RepThomasMassie.”
President Trump supported Gallrein. Massie’s defeat constituted yet another token of Trump’s intraparty influence.
Perhaps the second biggest political development yesterday was Trump’s endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against Republican incumbent Senator John Cornyn in Texas’s primary next week. Paxton figures to be the weaker general election candidate. He is, as they say with some justice, “scandal-plagued.” The New York Post Ryan King covered Trump’s endorsement of Paxton yesterday here.
King quotes Trump: “Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN. Our Country needs Fighters, and also Loyalty to the Cause of Greatness.” If I read that right, Paxton has gone through a lot, in some cases fairly. Perhaps that is to take the president too literally.
I understand that Paxton was likely to win the primary in any event. Now President Trump will be able to add a notch to his belt. So there is that. Democrats have their man, loosely speaking, in one James Talarico. Is Paxton a stronger candidate against Talarico? I don’t think so, but we’re on the (extremely expensive) road to find out.
Texas’s redrawn 35th Congressional District features a Democratic primary that has attracted attention by virtue of candidate “therapist” Maureen Galindo. Galindo is running against the relatively “moderate” Democrat Johnny Garcia.
Galindo is the kind of candidate who will give Tucker Carlson ideas. She wrote last week on Instagram that she would turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”
And that’s not all! It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Now that’s some therapy! If she doesn’t prevail in the primary, Massie and Galindo can team up to produce a dynamite podcast.
The San Antonio Current reports “House candidate Maureen Galindo pledges to send ‘American zionists’ to internment camp.” Galindo helpfully explains in the story’s subhead that “she’s not antisemitic.”
We understand. She’s like Tucker!
As it turns out, a shadowy Republican PAC is supporting Galindo in the primary. Jewish Insider reports here. The redrawn district is measured at R+7 and assessed likely Republican by Inside Elections.
Apparently it’s not that big a deal to take the risk of adding to the Democrats’ ever growing chorus of allgedly non-anti-Semitic anti-Zionists and miscellaneous nuts. Maybe I’m too risk averse for this racket. I’m beginning to think I’m out of step with the political strategists guiding the future of the Republican Party.
If a Republican candidate proposed putting Jews in work camps it would be a national media story for days.
There is no version of America where rhetoric like this is acceptable. https://t.co/EVbqoZRURl
— Dave McCormick (@DaveMcCormickPA) May 19, 2026
The New York Post takes a look at the big picture of last night’s results in Victor Nava’s story “Nine key takeaways from election night in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Georgia.”
