Sen. John Cornyn's primary challenger is accusing the Texas GOP of manipulating his re-election bid.
Much like the DNC favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016, Dwayne Stovall says Texas Republicans are going out of their way to promote Cornyn.
Stovall’s campaign recently issued a press release saying, “A recent fundraising letter that went out from the Republican Party of Texas and signed by RPT chairman James Dickey urges Texans, during this primary cycle, to ‘keep John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate,’ despite having several challengers.”
“Former GOP chairman, Steve Munisteri, was hired by John Cornyn to run his re-election campaign. He was also quietly hired by the RPT to manage state party outreach throughout Texas. Munisteri frequently makes stops in counties, combining his pitch to re-elect Cornyn with his outreach efforts. To do this, Munisteri has used party offices and resources that are not available to other candidates.”
In a recent radio interview, Stovall said his strong showing against Cornyn six years ago has the establishment on their heels.
“You don’t pull double-digits in 2014 on $70,000 while he spent in excess of $18 million to win the primary by the worst margin in the history of that race,” said Stovall.“He’s extremely weak.That’s why all the establishment folks are circling the wagons around him, because he is that weak.”
“I’ve authored two of the party planks in the current party platform statewide,” Stovall added.“But there is a huge disjunct between those of us who are in the party who go to work every day and try to live by those principles and those people at the highest levels of the party who really don’t care what we’re doing.”
Chairman Dickey responded to Stovall’s allegations on Facebook last week:
"Yesterday it was brought to my attention that a fundraising letter went out last week with language that clearly crossed the line of endorsing in a Primary- endorsing President Trump and speaking very favorably of Senator Cornyn, both of whom have Primary challengers.
I have personally strived to see that this line is never crossed. Unfortunately, I don’t always catch everything, and for that I am sorry. I tracked down where the letter came from, learned that it was put into production last fall, and did not follow our normal communications process. We have a solid track record of discovering and preventing these types of errors, but we will take even more precautions to ensure this does not happen again. And again, while we support our President and elected officials as officeholders, I am committed to achieving the most fair Primary for all candidates in any race.”