In Texas politics, nothing gets thrown away — not even old attacks

There's something almost admirable about the laziness of it. A Democratic Senate candidate in Texas digs up a 2018 attack line, dusts it off, and runs it back as if nobody in the state owns a calendar. It tells you something when the freshest idea a campaign can muster is six years old. Politics recycles plenty, but usually there's an attempt to dress the old material up as new. Here they didn't even bother with a new coat of paint.

The bigger story is what this says about the state of the race itself. When both sides are relitigating old controversies instead of making a case for 2024, it's because neither one has found anything better to run on. Texas voters have heard these arguments before, and rehashing them isn't persuasion, it's inertia. Campaigns default to reheating old fights when they don't trust their own message to carry the day.

Texas Republicans shouldn't get smug about this either. If the answer to a recycled attack is another round of the same old rebuttals from years past, that's not a win, it's just two campaigns talking past each other with scripts from a different election. Voters can tell the difference between a candidate fighting for the future of the state and one fighting the last war because it's easier than fighting this one.

What actually matters to Texans right now, the border, energy prices, jobs, isn't going to be settled by dredging up a six-year-old ad. Old attacks don't win new arguments. Whichever campaign figures that out first will have the advantage nobody else in this race seems interested in earning.