When U.S. Senator John Cornyn was last up for re-election in 2014, the Texas Democratic Party was in a bad way. Just a month before the March primary, the party was warning Democrats not to support the leading Senate candidate, Kesha Rogers, a conspiratorial Lyndon LaRouche Democrat who wanted to both “crush Wall Street” and impeach Obama.
The party’s preferred pick—and eventual nominee—was David Alameel, a self-funding multimillionaire dentist and conservative Democrat who had spent $4.5 million of his own money in a crowded 2012 primary for the 33rd Congressional District in Dallas and Fort Worth, netting himself 2,000 votes and a fourth-place finish. When the 2014 Senate primary rolled around, Alameel had more luck, beating the LaRouche Democrat in a runoff, but he was very clearly not a real threat in the final race. Cornyn languidly swatted him away, getting 62 percent of the vote.
Cornyn hasn’t had much trouble holding on to the Senate seat he won after Phil Gramm left the post in 2002, but now a new clutch of Democrats is lining up to take on Cornyn in 2020. There’s Royce West, a sitting state senator from Dallas; MJ Hegar, who ran a viral campaign that helped her come close to ousting a Republican congressman in a conservative district near Austin; Chris Bell, a former congressman from Houston and the Democrats’ failed 2006 gubernatorial nominee; and Amanda Edwards, a Houston city council member.
